Dan Wakefield - Going All the Way - A Novel

“I dunno.”

Cleveland was in first place in the American League. Maybe the Yankees weren’t invincible.

“Does he always go to bars in the afternoon?”

Sonny put the paper down. “For Christ sake, what business is it of yours? What if he goes to bars in the morning? What if he sleeps in bars overnight?”

“Don’t yell. There’s no need to yell.”

“I’m not yelling! I’m asking what business of yours is it what Gunner Casselman does?”

“It’s my business what happens to my own son.”

“What’s that got to do with Gunner?”

“If you lie down with dogs, you come up with fleas.”

“Listen. That guy is a friend of mine.”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“Well, it’s none of your damn business. For your information, he happens to be a great guy.”

He picked up the sports page again and tried to concentrate on the standings, but they blurred before his eyes.

“Really, I just thought maybe you’d want him to come to your party. Now that he’s such a good friend of yours.”

Sonny looked up, eyeing his mother carefully. She was peeking in the stove.

“What do you mean, my party?” he asked.

“Just a little party. A little dinner for you.”

“ What party? I don’t know about any party.”

“Well, of course you don’t. It’s a surprise party. For your homecoming. This Friday night.”

Sonny squeezed his hands together and tried not to raise his voice. “Who’s coming?” he said.

His mother let out a high, nervous little laugh. “Well, I couldn’t tell you that , or it wouldn’t be any surprise at all.”

She set a plate in front of him with a fresh homemade apple turnover topped with fudge ripple ice cream, and beside it, a large glass of Pepsi with a lot of ice. It was, or used to be, his favorite breakfast, though in college and the Army he had tried to learn to like eggs and sausage and hot black coffee because it seemed more manly. And yet whenever he was home, his mother got him back on the gooey stuff, and he couldn’t resist it, even though it made him mad at her and at himself, and after eating those fattening sweets he felt almost as guilty and depressed as he did after jacking off. He often wondered why he couldn’t help doing things that made him feel so awful after he did them.

“Would it now?” she asked. “Be a surprise if I told you who was coming?”

“Is it people I know?”

“Some you do, some you don’t. But the ones you don’t I promise you’re going to like.”

He had heard such promises before. “Who is it?” he insisted. “Who’s coming that I don’t know?”

“Well, since you don’t know them, you wouldn’t know their names anyway.”

“Who are they?”

The fudge ripple was beginning to melt down the hot sides of the homemade apple turnover.

“I won’t eat till you tell me,” he said, laying down the ultimate threat.

Mrs. Burns sighed and said with a fake casual tone, “Oh, just some of the MRA bunch who happen to be in town.”

Sonny very deliberately folded his napkin, set it on the table, and went into the living room. He sat on the antique velvet settee and lit a cigarette, trying very hard to be calm. The very initials of Moral Re-Armament made him want to scream. It was a nondenominational (but mainly WASP) religious movement with great appeal for middle-class people who found in its doctrine of “Absolute Purity, Absolute Honesty, and Absolute Love,” and in its tearful, wrenching, free-lance confessional sessions, a sort of fulfillment that was lacking in the ordinary going-to-church kind of religion. The adherents to this faith seemed to Sonny a band of smiling, self-satisfied, well-mannered fanatics. They didn’t drink or smoke or jack off, or screw anyone unless they were married, and the girls gave up makeup and pulled their hair into knots and tried not to look sexy. They sang cheery, uplifting songs and looked bright-eyed and serene, in a lobotomized kind of way. Some of the full-time salaried members traveled around in “teams” trying to recruit people, and put on shows and plays proving how wonderful it was to be like they were and believe as they did. Mrs. Burns had gone to one of their performances in Indianapolis and seen the happy shining faces of those wonderful young people and felt a great surge of hope that this might be the answer for her troubled, faith-stripped son.

Sonny had been deeply religious as a boy but, as his mother so often explained to people in a trembling voice, “in college he lost his faith.” She ascribed the loss to the insidious influence of intellectuals, who were known to be almost all atheistic and who yet were given the task of teaching the young. Her suspicion of the influence of college was bolstered by most of her friends, including some who had been there, like Cousin Harriet Van de Kamp, who was on the Indianapolis school board and told Mrs. Burns on good authority that every college faculty in the country was riddled with Reds. Even the ones in Indiana! Sonny was only one of many innocent young people who had fallen under their atheistic influence and was brainwashed by their Godless doctrines. It was Mrs. Burns’ most fervent desire to help Sonny find his faith again, and toward this end she had enlisted an impressive array of spiritual counselors. The fact that none had succeeded in helping Sonny locate what he had lost (his mother seemed to think of it as a tangible object, like a misplaced car key) did not in the least discourage her but in fact drove her on to even greater efforts.

Once, on the pretense of taking “a different kind of family vacation,” she had got him to Mackinac Island in Michigan, the MRA’s U.S. headquarters, where whole teams of firm-jawed young men who all seemed to have been champion pole-vaulters or halfbacks when they were in college (which for many was quite some time ago) had tried to make him see the light. They explained how much fun purity could be and told Sonny he would feel a lot better if he told them about some of the dirty things he had done which most every guy did at some time or other, like jacking off and thinking dirty stuff about girls (maybe even doing the dirty stuff!) before marriage. Sonny fled from the island after two sleepless nights, during which he was terrified that if he beat off, an entire team of former Ohio State football stars would burst in the room and demand that he confess and repent, in the name of God Almighty and the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

Mrs. Burns had to admit that the MRA system “hadn’t taken” with Sonny, but she evidently felt that later injections might do the trick. Like the bunch who were coming to supper for Sonny’s “surprise party” welcome-home from the service.

“Fuckin-A,” he said to himself. “Fuckin-A John Do.”

“It’s melting, dear,” his mother said.

She had put the ice cream and apple shit on a tray and brought it into the living room. It sat there before him, a runny disaster.

“What kind of potatoes would you like for the party supper, baked or sweet?”

“Either,” he said.

“I could make sweet with marshmallow topping.”

“Who else is coming?”

“Oh, Sonny, it wouldn’t be any surprise at all then. I wanted it—I wanted it—” Her voice was beginning to quiver.

“O.K.,” he said. “But listen.”

“Yes?”

“Don’t ask Gunner to come.”

“I thought it might do him some good,” she sniffed.

“Don’t ask him.”

“All right, dear. After all, it’s your party.”

Sonny stuck the spoon in the melting goo on the plate and started to eat, so she’d go away. And seeing him eat, she smiled and tiptoed out of the room. A little later, he heard the motor of the wagon burst to a start, like a mortar shell, and gravel churned noisily as Mrs. Burns ripped out of the driveway, hurrying to her missions.